White House blues

Never mind the US election fiasco. A showbiz row is raging over political drama The Contender, which stars Joan Allen, after her co-star Gary Oldman attacked its liberal stance. Joe Neumaier hears both sides of the argument

While Americans were glued to the climax of the election last week, with presidential hopefuls jabbing and sparring in soundbites, the most magnetic candidate was on movie screens, not on the campaign trail. But in an added twist, the movie has led to a heated dispute among the filmmakers that threatens to upstage its success.

The candidate was the fictional Senator Laine Hanson, a Democrat from Ohio, and, as played by Joan Allen in The Contender, she personalises the hot issues, including abortion, religion in schools, adultery, and pre-marital sexual shenanigans. Yet Allen, one of today's most talented and respected actresses, did not want her first leading role to be overly preachy.

'I wanted Laine to be real, to be grounded and multi-dimensional,' says Allen. 'I didn't want her to be sanctimonious; maybe she did have a sex scandal, maybe not; maybe she did steal her friend's husband away, as her rivals claim. I liked the flaws.'

In the film, written and directed by Rod Lurie, Laine is chosen by the President (Jeff Bridges) as his deputy after the Vice-Presi dent dies unexpectedly. But amid backroom machinations and Washington wheeling and dealing, her confirmation hearings quickly go negative. A fire-and-brimstone Republican congressman, Shelly Runyon (Gary Oldman, also one of the film's executive producers, effecting a perfect Midwest accent), dislikes Laine from the start and when sexually explicit pictures from her college days turn up, they give him ammunition. The problem is, Laine refuses to open her life up for dissection.

The synopsis may sound like a Movie of the Week but Lurie, a former Los Angeles film critic with a taste for Seventies political films like The Candidate and All the President's Men, wisely keeps Allen's quiet dignity at the heart of the engrossing drama. She has unsurprisingly emerged as an early Oscar favourite.

'I have a certain paranoia that people might be so fed up with politics they don't want to see a political film, but I think [the elections] feed into it,' says Allen. 'We all know how politicians conduct themselves. Having a sense of that, it was important to make the character as human as we could, by sticking a camera inside her life, almost in a documentary way.'

Despite being played by Oldman, she says the congressman is not necessarily the villain. 'There will be people who come down on his side of the debate. It's not his politics, but his method of undoing her that is his flaw.'

Two such people would be Oldman and his manager and co-producer, Douglas Urbanski. Oldman has been at the centre of a bitter row about the film's political soul, which has almost overshadowed the film's positive critical reception. It began with a magazine interview in which he implied that Lurie altered the political tone of the film while editing to appease Dreamworks, the studio that distributed it, and its Democrat-supporting co-chairmen Steven Spielberg, David Geffen, and Jeffrey Katzenberg.

Oldman believes Runyon, the film's villain, was presented much more sympathetically in the original script and Lurie subsequently betrayed the film's principles after Dreamworks agreed to distribute the film. Since Dreamworks, the studio behind American Beauty and Gladiator , is often praised for its laissez faire attitude towards filmmakers, the accusations have caused a stir in Hollywood especially after Oldman failed to appear at the movie's premiere.

Oldman says: 'I am a little disappointed that you have a company that waves the flag for artists and champions filmmakers such as Woody Allen, and it can't honour something that actually doesn't cost them anything.' Hollywood's liberal bias is hardly new. Election year has seen a procession of starry Democrats backing and funding Gore so Oldman's stance against such powerful figures seems brave and anomalous.

He also complained that Lurie wrongheadedly called his character the villain in press material, and disputed Lurie's theory that he had experienced a type of 'Stockholm syndrome', supposedly oversympathising with his role.

Urbanski has been more forthright, referring to the film as 'almost a Goebbels-like piece of propaganda', posing and answering what he regards as the crucial question. 'Would a publicly left-leaning company, which has made its politics an issue, release a left-leaning film?' he says. 'That's a fair question, but it's loaded. Gary and I stand behind the film; we've never said anything else. But the politics of the film as it ends up are quite different from the film we set out to make. But that's not down to Dreamworks - that's Rod Lurie.

He adds: 'Neither Gary or I saw Runyon as the heavy of the film. Joan's character is an atheist and Gary's is the bad guy? But we were making a film that was in shades of grey, a Rorschach test; in the marketing and press material, Rod became contradictory. Was he influenced? I believe he just morphed. And he developed diarrhoea of the mouth. He began to talk about heroes and villains. He made a horrible comment about Stockholm syndrome, implying that one had to have a mental disorder to see a conservative as sympathetic. That's horrible.

'And he reopened this idea from many years ago that Gary is cantankerous. Gary's a wonderful actor, and a terribly sweet man. He isn't cantankerous - he produced the film!'

Lurie has held his corner but concedes: 'If this was an anti-Clinton film, I don't know if it would have ended up in Dreamworks.' But he stresses that nobody put pressure on him to change the political tone. 'I am a liberal. I have always been a liberal. Douglas thinks all intelligent people must be conservative.'

Lurie may have changed how he saw Oldman's character, but he reportedly wrote the title character specifically with Allen in mind. She joined Chicago's Steppenwolf Theatre Company in 1977, working alongside actors such as John Malkovich and Gary Sinise. She won a 1988 Best Actress Tony Award co-starring with Malkovich on Broadway in Burn This, and early roles in films including Tucker: A Man and His Dream and Ethan Frome led to back-to-back Best Supporting Actress Oscar nominations for Nixon (1995) and The Crucible (1996), and critically lauded performances in The Ice Storm and Pleasantville. In the latter, she adroitly played a Fifties TV sitcom character who discovers desire and sensuality.

'There's always a subtext to everything Joan plays,' says Gary Ross, the writer and director of Pleasantville. 'A depth to the character that isn't in a moment or in a line, it's something that she creates underneath. That's what makes her such a remarkable actress. Joan not only finds the big idea, but the depth and the resonance in that idea.

'For Pleasantville , she had to experience things as if they were entirely new. This was a character who was really more Eve in the garden than June Cleaver. So I needed someone with incredible acting chops, and she was my first and only choice. I begged her to do it, I didn't know anyone else who could bring that complexity.'

Though she's direct and polite with a Middle-American blonde prettiness, one of Allen's specialities is women whose tough sexual and moral choices drive the plot. In addition to Pleasantville , she played a principled woman accused of witchcraft in The Crucible, a wife struggling with changing social mores in The Ice Storm and now she's The Contender, who won't play public games at the expense of her private life.

'One commonality seems to be that they're the moral centre of the films,' says Allen. 'There is a sexuality operating, yes, though it's not overt. In The Contender, Laine has a confidence in herself that you don't ordinarily see; I mean, there's not much sexuality oozing out of female politicians. Laine believes that sex has no place in the political arena, but she is not unaware of its power.'

Despite the fact that Lurie wrote the screenplay with her in mind, Allen, 44, knows that as far as power in Hollywood goes, actresses in their forties still have little of it. 'The older you get, the more difficult it is to find good roles,' she says.

'I might have, I hope, a little easier time of it because I'm basically a character actress, and The Contender has now taken me into the central role. But when Rod shopped the script around to some studios, they wouldn't go along if I was attached. It's not that they don't respect my work - I do feel that I'm respected - it's about bankability. Rod raised the money independently. Maybe after The Contender it'll change, but it is frightening. There's a short list, and I'm not quite on it yet.'

Allen, who lives in New York with her husband, actor Peter Friedman, and their six-year-old daughter Sadie, says that going back to the stage doesn't appeal to her at this point. 'I'm just not hungry for it,' she says. 'I keep hoping I'm going to get hungry for it again, but I'm not.'

Is she hungry for a Best Actress nomination? Asked if she thinks she'll be the contender to beat at next year's Oscars, Allen smiles, looks skyward and shrugs. 'We'll see. People have mentioned it. If there's talk about nominations, it's a nice reflection that the performance is working and that the whole film is working.'

Whether she gets an Oscar nod or not, Allen doesn't kid herself about the lack of good roles for women. Considering that, she says she might be hungry for something different. She'll next be seen as the sorceress Morgause in the TV mini-series The Mists of Avalon about the women in King Arthur's Camelot.

'I liked playing John Travolta's wife in Face/Off because it was so different, though I didn't have any action scenes,' says Allen. 'In Mists of Avalon I got to cast spells! So it might be fun to do an Alien -type movie.'Whichever type of movie she chooses, Allen will surely be voted one of the best things in it.

 The Contender screens at the Regus London Film Festival (020 7928 3232) next week, before going on general release.